He has wrote books about war, politics, sex, and Hollywood
His book, The Naked and the Dead, was his first novel
He thought that the war brought out all of the conflicts and tension of the Americas, so his writing, in a way, mirrored America
He writes so that we can see form a point of view from the soldier and the officer
He showed bad relations between officers and enlisted men, preoccupation with sex, the distrust of women, strong opinions on war, the purposes of war, the fear of death, and the feeling that no individual matters
He goes into strong detail
His second book was Barbary Shore
In this book, there is a man who happens to be a FBI agent
There is a character who is an ex-communist and GPU agent
He has dropped out of the party and and gone underground
The characters have a political argument, which is the central point
His politics are false though
He takes the politics too seriously
This is one of the best novels to read about politics, where you can avoid political fanaticism
He find the The sources of human feeling in human realities deeper than politics
He does that so that life appears in his pages as life
He writes so that life does not appear as a political blueprint
Other books about this topic, do not have deep roots
Grew up in NYC
He went through the great depression
The Deer Park has a character who is a homosexual pimp
He wrote a short story about a girl who had an encounter anal intercourse
Norman had a lot to do with politics in the 60's
He went to political meetings, marches and protests
It was said that it is as LBJ conjured up the Vietnam War for Mailer
and then he was sent by God to Nixon
He challenged McGeorge Bundy to a fistfight
He wrote a journalistic novel called The Armies of the Night (1969)
He was in the novel
It is about a march on the Pentagon to stop the war
He won the National Book Award that year
With the coming of Regan, his career started to decline
He wrote a biography about Marylin Monroe
He still did not gain his earlier fame
He thought that in the 60's, he would find himself as an age old prophet
He found himself to be put down in that era.
The war helped give a topic to Mailer
It helped him cope with the Lacking of American life and American characters
"It is not routine to bring off a long novel when your ambition is more than major, when you will settle for nothing less than an attempt to write a great novel, and when you are into your sixties and not all that well."
In 1970, he went into a collison coarse with the feminist movement
He proposed that gender might determine the way a person percivers and orders realtiy
People say that he is not a writer for cinema
Mailer became tired of politics in the 1980's
"Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existence in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is." (from Ancient Evenings)
He supported the 1991 Persian Gulf War
He supported for patrioctic reasons
He felt that the U.S. was in a bad state and needed a war
The Gospel According to the Son is a re-telling of the story of Jesus
It is a mild re-telling compared to other books like The Last Temptations of Christ by Nikos Kazantzákis or The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
The Time of our Time was an anthology
It included his fiction and non-fiction
He was awarded The National Book Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2005
His last novel was The Castle In The Forest (2007)
It was about the young Adolf Hitler
He died November 10, 2007
He died of renal failure
He was 84 years old
He had been married 6 times
THE NAKED AND THE DEAD, 1948
THE DEER PARK, 1955
THE WHITE NEGRO, 1957
ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF, 1959
DEATHS FOR THE LADIES, AND OTHER DISASTERS, 1962
THE PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS, 1963
AN AMERICAN DREAM, 1965
CANNIBALS AND CHRISTIANS, 1966
THE BULLFIGHT, 1967
WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM?, 1967
THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION, 1967
THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT, 1968
THE IDOL AND THE OCTOPUS, 1968
MIAMI AND THE SIEGE OF CHIGACO, 1968
RUNNING AGAINST THE MACHINE, 1969
OF A FIRE ON THE MOON, 1970
THE PRISONER OF SEX, 1971
KING OF THE HILL, 1971
THE LONG PATROL, 1971
ST. GEORGE AND THE GODFATHER, 1972
EXISTENTIAL ERRANDS, 1972
MARILYN, 1973
THE FIGHT OF GRAFFITI / WATCHING MY NAME GO BY, 1975
THE FLIGHT, 1975
GENIUS AND LUST, 1976 - (a portrait of Henry Miller)
SOME HONORABLE MEN, 1976
THE EXECUTUONER'S SONG, 1979
OF WOMEN AND THEIR ELEGANCE, 1980
PIECES AND PONTIFICATIONS, 1982
THE ESSENTIAL MAILER, 1982
ANCIENT EVENINGS, 1984
TOUGH GUYS DON'T DANCE, 1984
HUCKLEBERRY FINN, 1985
HARLOT'S GHOST, 1991
PABLO AND FERNANDE, 1994
OSWALD'S TALE: AN AMERICAN MYSTERY, 1995
PORTRAIT OF PICASSO AS A YOUNG MAN, 1995
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE SON, 1997
THE TIME OF OUR TIME, 1998
INTO THE MIRROR by Lawrence Schiller, 2002 - based upon an investigation by Norman Mailer and Lawrence Schiller; dramatized for television by N. Mailer
THE SPOOKY ART, 2003
WHY ARE WE AT WAR?, 2003
MODEST GIFTS, 2003
THE BIG EMPTY, 2006 (with John Buffalo Mailer)
THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST, 2007
He is thought to be too narrow and onesided
People think that he does not view or experience life to the fullest
It is said that no other author at once has been so brilliant, vaired, controversial, public, prolific, and misunderstood.
“I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.”
He started to gain fame in the 1950's
He gained fame as an anti-establishment essayist
He said that the book Das Kapital helped him become a better writer
He did not believe that Communism would solve all problems
He wrote a note to Fidel Castro saying "you are giving us hope".
His essay The White Negro, examined violence, hysteria, crimes and confusion in American society
He did this in a well executed way
He was listed among the New Journalists, who applied the techniques of the novel to depict real events and people
There is a memoir called 'Making Love With Norman'
Carole Mallory was the author
She sold the book to Harvard
There is a 20 page sex scene
Mailer was awarded the "Bad Sex in Fiction" award
Carole said that Norman was a real man, and he knew what he was doing
http://worldbookonline.com/advanced/criticism?id=lc100432&st=norman+mailer (online)
http://kirjasto.sci.fi/nmailer.htm (online)
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/barbary-shore--by-norman-mailer-1281 (print)
http://www.americanlegends.com/authors/norman_mailer.html (print)
Goldstone, Herbert. The Novels of Norman Mailer.March 1956. World Book Advanced. Web. 7 Dec. 2010.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/norman-mailer/a-brief-history-of-norman-mailer/653/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/23/norman-mailer-sex-memoir_n_98160.html
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/press/releases/2007/mailer/